Sep

24

Sam Harris and Religion

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Since I don’t have a job yet, I’ve had a lot of time in the last few weeks to do some reading. I picked up several books from the local public library—mostly fiction, and some non-fiction from the Radford University library. I plan to write a couple of book reviews in the next few days.

I found two books by Sam Harris at RU: The End of Faith and A Letter to a Christian Nation. As the titles might suggest, Harris is not a fan of religion, especially not in public life. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford and is supposed to be working on another degree in neuroscience or something like that. He is clearly an atheist.

His two books are polemics against the role of religion. He claims that religion has no place in our modern society. Any good things that religion can provide can be found elsewhere and religion itself is the cause of substantial misery in the world.

Ironically, several of his positions I agree with. He is an ethical realist, which means he thinks there is such a thing as right and wrong (or at least good and bad). He contends that Islamic nations cannot develop democracy overnight because of their religion—there is good empirical evidence to support this claim. He argues that religious moderates are straddling the fence and need to choose one side or the other.

But these points of agreement are far removed from his central ideas. Read more

Sep

3

The end of Harry Potter

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The Harry Potter books have taken the youth culture by storm. For this fact, one must give some credit to J.K. Rowling for her iconic creation. But like most cultural icons, the books have sparked a lot of controversy. Literary critics deride the style of the books, and with some good reasons. Many Christians object to the witch/wizard themes and the use of “magic.”1 Another criticism of the books is their moral tone. To me, this is a much more interesting criticism and has better arguments behind it. In this review I plan to examine the moral tone of the Harry Potter books and the last book in particular.

I have read all of the HP books and have thought for some time that the last book would be very important to the moral structure of the previous ones. The seventh book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is one of the better-written of the series. It is long. 759 pages to be exact. It also includes a lot of explanation. In the previous books the explanations can be tedious, but in HP7 they actually advance the story reasonably well. Importantly, however, they also provide some insight into the moral structure of Harry’s world.

Many have critiqued the HP books using an argument that essentially boils down thus: Harry’s world is not like ours. Needless to say, this argument fails to impress. But Rowling’s fantasy world lacks a clear moral standard. In a story about the conflict between good and evil, the absence of a moral center is a serious flaw. Commendably, good wins in the end (don’t worry; I’m not going to spoil the whole plot for you). But it isn’t clear at the end what we mean by “good.”

There are a couple of ways that an author can identify a moral structure. For one, he can explain it directly. This approach rarely works. A more common approach is to create a character who represents good—everything he does is good or is clearly justifiable. It is possible to never have a single good character and to still have a consistent moral standard, but to do so the author must make a consistent judgment about something. Unfortunately, Harry Potter doesn’t do any of these.

In the early books, certain actions were bad and the bad guys were bad because they did them. They employed “dark magic” or the “dark arts” and the “unforgivable curses” among other things. As the series progresses, the “good guys” start employing some of these same things. For example, in the seventh book, a Hogwarts teacher (a good one) uses an unforgivable curse.

In the middle of the series there is also a suggestion that certain kinds of people are bad. They are usually identified by Read more


  1. It seems, however, that the vast majority of Christians who accuse the HP books of ungodly witchcraft haven’t actually read the books. One could make a very good case that the magic in HP is no different than the magic in any other fantasy. I do not have space to explore this point here, but others have already done so. back↩

Mar

29

Simply Christian by N. T. Wright

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Many fellow Christians of my generation have found C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity a very helpful and thoughtful expression of their faith. In a way, this phenomenon is a testimony to the quality of Lewis’s thought and writing. The book was edited from radio talks he gave in the 1940s. Since then, arguably no one has made as good a case for Christianity.

In 2006, N. T. Wright published Simply Christian. Critics have lauded it as a worthy successor to Mere Christianity. It is. Wright reintroduces many of Lewis’s arguments, but comes at the issues from a different perspective, providing helpful clarifications and some novel thoughts as well.

In fact, the perspective of the book is one of its greatest virtues. Wright, like Lewis, comes at the topic of Christianity in a fairly non-Christian way. The book’s subtitle is “Why Christianity Makes Sense.” It reads like a grand (if brief) tour of biblical theology intended for those who have little knowledge of Christian ideas. Wright tries to demonstrate that Christianity is more than a run-of-the-mill religion, and that it makes a compelling case for belief. However, as Christian readers of Mere Christianity have seen, sometimes a thoughtful examination of Christianity from the outside (or what seems like the outside) can be immensely helpful.1 By the end of the book, it is sometimes hard to decide who Wright’s intended audience actually is. He still targets unbelievers, but an honest believer will find plenty of food for thought. In fact, if a Christian reader has never considered Wright’s ideas, he might think that Wright is trying to convince him.

Wright begins by addressing four areas that modern ideas of life and the world fail to adequately address. Read more


  1. Wright himself has reviewed Mere Christianity and his thoughts are quite helpful. back↩